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Halloween. Candy, costumes, carnivals—it’s a wonderful time of year. But Halloween also has its dark side. Witches, ghosts, blood, and UNICEF are also just as much a part of Halloween. Yes, UNICEF.
Almost everyone knows the cute, orange boxes young supermen, gorillas, ghosts, and cartoon characters carry around collecting money for United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF). This year even some religious groups on Harvard’s campus were duped into fundraising for them. But what they didn’t know is where the money really goes. UNICEF was created to feed, clothe, and provide medication for poor children caught in the disastrous wake of WWII. In spite of this, over the past thirty to forty years, UNICEF has been playing a devious little trick of its own. Starting in the late 1960’s under pressure from Sweden, India, Pakistan, and Malthusian theory, UNICEF began funding contraceptives, abortifacients, sterilizations and abortions worldwide. This was begun in spite of opposition from all African countries except Nigeria and nominal opposition from the US. In 1972, UNICEF met with the World Health Organization (WHO), another pro-abortion organization, to discuss the “ways of accelerating the expansion of family planning services.” This, like many of UNICEF’s statements, may sound benign, but UNICEF’s actions proved their evil intentions. In 1987 UNICEF, according to its own records, officially endorsed abortion, after years of silently supporting the measure as a way of family planning. Things quickly went from bad to worse. UNICEF vaccinated 3.4 million people, mainly women aged 12-45, in the Philippines against tetanus with a vaccine laced with the hormone B-hCG. This led to the sterilization of almost all the women along with frequent miscarriages. (Additional instances occurred in Mexico, Nicaragua, and other countries.) In 1997 UNICEF named China the most baby friendly country in the world. They forgot, however, to mention in their report China’s “One-Child” policy (more on that later), the “freezing” and “dying” rooms where little girls are tied or strapped to beds and toddler chairs and left to die, and the frequency of forced child-labor. By 1998 UNIFEF could no longer carry out projects like this on its own so the UN allied it with UNFPA (United Nations Fund for Population Activities) and the WHO, both of whom had strong ties to Planned Parenthood International and encouraged abortion and sterilization. Now, better equipped, UNICEF went on a project spree. In 1998-1999 UNICEF funded a book to be distributed in Mexico and El Salvador. The book in addition to promoting homosexual sex and masturbation, also promoted bestiality. UNICEF also moved from helping kids to preventing and aborting them. In Africa, according to the widely respected think tank the Population Research Institute (PRI) on May 28, 1999, “contraceptive and aborticfacient supplies have bumped desperately needed supplies, and even food, from supply convoys.” This is also corroborated by international peacekeepers in the area. Quoting an Albanian doctor in charge of a maternal hospital ward in a PRI report, he was “short of antibiotics and serum, but, much superfluous material, like shipments of birth control arrived today.” The things that UNICEF would not do, it funded its allies to do. The WHO, following UNICEF’s example, came out in 1998 with programs promoting “family planning services” for children as young as 10. Then, worst of all, UNICEF began funding UNFPA’s support of China’s “One-Child” policy in annual sums as large as $5 million. The “One-Child” policy works something like this. If a family has a second child they pay a fine of eight times their annual income and an annual penalty. In some of the provinces, where citizens tend to flout this law, forced abortions and sterilizations are reoccurring tactics. In the Guangdong province in August 2001, the government ordered that 20,000 abortions take place before the end of the year along with the forced sterilization of every woman after they had their first child. In the worst cases, these abortions happen over eight and a half months into the pregnancy through the administration of saline solution injections into the child. These facts come from U.S. State Department research. UNFPA isn’t afraid to get their hands dirty either. They have 32 clinics throughout China, which share facilities with China’s population control agency. The PRI has witnessed women taken into rooms in UNFPA clinics, against their will, to have abortions. Even in the face of all of this evidence, UNICEF denies its complicity. Its executive director states it “does not advocate any particular method of family planning,” it “does not provide contraceptive supplies,” it “never provided support for abortion,” and so on and so forth. UNICEF continues to hide behind such tricky wording and outright lies, proved so by its own documentation and that of other respectable governments. So why the secrecy on UNICEF’s part? One word: funding. First off, it’s illegal in the U.S. for private citizens and the government, which sends over $25 million a year to UNICEF, to send money to organizations that support forced abortions and sterilizations. Under the current administration, funds have been dramatically cut by as much as $50 million, based on State Department findings. Additionally, good and moral religious organizations, like those at Harvard, would never support UNICEF if they knew the truth. Though, such organizations must be careful to find the truth. Their recent experience with UNICEF has been a “good lesson in the importance of careful and responsible research,” in the words of a member of a religious group on campus who wished to remain anonymous. But still, why would UNICEF take such a turn from their original mandate to such Halloween trickery? There are other options for population control. The government sponsored “natural family planning” in the Philippines, started after UNICEF was kicked out, has been widely successful. So has the “Abstinence: It’s cool” program in Zambia (one of only two countries which have stabilized AIDS rates and reduced multiple partner sex) funded by USAID. Perhaps UNICEF’s vision for the world is best summed up in by one of its most ardent Congressional advocates. “There needs to be flexibility on life,”noted moral exemplar Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee (D-TX) in her incisive commentary regarding U.S. opposition of forced abortion and sterilization. If flexibility means forced sterilization, count the US out. |